


Ghost

by manatee_patronus



Category: Ringu | The Ring - All Media Types, The Ring (2002)
Genre: Depictions of triggers, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Philosophical reflection on the catharsis of horror as a genre, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-29
Updated: 2017-01-29
Packaged: 2018-09-20 16:45:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9500627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manatee_patronus/pseuds/manatee_patronus
Summary: After a breakup with her boyfriend, Elena Groen returns to her childhood home, which feels haunted to her now. She finds herself suddenly afraid of the fictional ghost of her childhood nightmares, and she confronts fragments of the real nightmare that she lived through in that house. She ultimately realizes that the two horrors are related in a surprising way.





	1. Chapter 1

 

After driving through her hometown, Elena pulled into her mother’s narrow driveway. It was the corner house of the neighborhood, just across the street from a Hardee’s. A wide brick porch sat beneath dripping, waving leaves from the trees in the front yard. Normally a bright, cheerful house, now its stone steps glistened with rain, and shadows from the thunderclouds veiled the brick with mourning. All of the windows were dark.

Her mother was up in Ohio with Wesley until Monday, visiting his grandmother, who was very sick. She had told Elena that she could always come home, implying but never outright saying, “in case you and Alan break up.” She had never approved of Alan, thinking him too old for Elena.

            With a sigh, Elena looked back at her pile of suitcases. She couldn’t bear the thought of making multiple trips from the car to the house in the rain, so she took the suitcase that had her toiletries and dashed to the porch. In any case, she thought as she unlocked the door, all she felt up to was wearing pajamas and lying around, and she knew that there were some old pajamas that she had left up in her closet.

            Elena left her suitcase by the stairs and walked to the kitchen to get a glass of water, passing her mother’s “Elena shrine” in the hallway. This was a table laden entirely with pictures of Elena at various ages. One framed picture showed Elena at 8, wearing a purple shawl, carrying a toy parasol, and posing with her mouth half-open as she’d seen models do in magazines. Right beside this picture was Elena’s high school senior photo. The “shrine” had gotten its name one day when Elena had joked with her mother that it was kind of creepy to have that many pictures of someone in one place, almost like a display at a funeral.

            She stopped dead at the end of the hallway before turning left into the kitchen. To her right was the computer room. Someone with long, dark hair was sitting in the computer chair.

            Placing a hand over her pounding heart, she forced herself to look to the right. Her mother had hung a black jacket over the back of the computer chair. Elena exhaled with relief, still feeling the thrill course through her. _Wow, it’s been a long time since I thought about you_ , she addressed the ghost that was not in the computer chair.

            Elena leaned against the counter as she drank water from the icemaker, still gazing warily across the hall toward the chair. Eventually, she walked over and knocked the jacket onto the seat of the chair.

How odd that she should be reminded now of that ghost, from a horror film that she had seen when she was a child. True, the film had made a strong impression on her, and this ghost had featured prominently in her nightmares for many years afterward. She wore a white dress and long dark hair and her skin was water-rotted.

The last time she had encountered the ghost was the night of her graduation party in high school. Her father and his parents had attended; it had been her first time seeing them in several years. That night, she had been walking back to her room from the bathroom in the middle of the night when a flash of white in her peripheral vision had stopped her short at the top of the stairs. Fear stole her breath completely – otherwise she might have cried out. The ghost stood at the foot of the stairs, her upturned face hidden by a veil of hair. When Elena was able to turn, shaking, and look down the stairs, she saw a stripe of moonlight on the floor that she had taken to be the ghost’s dress, interrupted by a deep black shadow.

Though that last encounter had occurred more than four years ago, Elena knew that she was a worrier. She supposed that it must be natural, with no one real in the house to worry about, that she would worry instead about imaginary people. Giving her head a shake, she set the empty glass down on the countertop and returned to the foot of the stairs, where she had left her suitcase.

Looping her hand through the handle of the bag, she carried it awkwardly up the stairs until she stood outside of her room, whose door was cracked on her right. Everything about her room was exactly the same as she’d left it, down to the made bed and the sheet music that sat on the electronic piano. The only thing that betrayed her absence was a stale smell, like a box of cereal that had been open for a month.

_Pajama time_ , Elena thought with a faint stirring of pleasure. She crossed to the walk-in closet and rummaged among her hangers for her onesie penguin pajamas. As she climbed into them, she noticed a pile of thick volumes in a box labelled “photo albums” on the floor. Apparently her mother was now using her closet for extra storage space. She picked up one of the albums and let it fall open to a random page.

She saw pictures of herself as an infant. Before she had time to snap the book shut again, she was arrested by a picture of her father. The photograph was so faded that his blond hair looked gray, and his grin was simultaneously boyish and devilish. He held his daughter up with his arm around her naked waist.

Perhaps anyone else who looked at this picture would see a proud, young father. What Elena saw was something that disturbed her in most old pictures from her childhood: a wild, glassy quality in her eyes – a deliriousness and a detachment from the present – both of which she recognized as mute screams of the soul that hid within her tiny, violated body.

As she stared at that look of desperation, phantom sounds crept up from the cellar of her thoughts. Her father hissing at her to hold still and her own voice begging, babbling incoherently, not yet accustomed to speech –

She ripped the page from the album and tore it into several pieces. The ripping was soothing white noise for her searing brain. She dropped the pieces into her wastepaper basket, threw the album none-too-gently back in the box, and went back downstairs. She was angry and hurt that her mother had kept pictures of her father.

A minute and five seconds in the microwave later, Elena was eating pizza rolls on the couch in the living room, watching one of the countdown-to-Halloween splatter films on television. Like the ripping of the photograph, she also found this soothing.

As she watched a corpse crawl spider-like on the ceiling, Elena wondered about the appeal of horror as a genre. Wasn’t there enough horror in the world without these films? Maybe so, but in the horror genre, unlike in real life, there was justice. Those whose voices were snuffed out by death had the opportunity and supernatural power to speak and be heard, and even to seek revenge. But Elena herself was still wounded, with Gorgons in the landscape of her memory that she couldn’t look at directly. In her case, the aggressor had triumphed: he had no daily horror to carry, no buttons on his body that uniquely triggered panic; he did not live, as she did, always on the edge of a nightmare.

At 10:00, Elena turned off the television. She avoided looking at the black screen as she took her dish to the sink, half-sure it would reflect _her_ , the ghost. Indeed, her uneasy thoughts lingered on the ghost as she brushed her teeth upstairs and hurried through the dark hallway, past the spot at the top of the stairs where the ghost had once frightened her, to her bedroom. She turned off the light and snuggled down into her blankets.

Her eyes shut tight, she willed sleep to come. But within minutes, something creaked in her room - one of the inexplicable creaks that old houses make. Yet tonight, as it had done countless times in childhood, her mind conjured the image of the ghost, hunched in the corner of the room, her mottled hands curved into claws, her face veiled. Eyes still closed tight, Elena pulled the blankets up over her head and folded her arms in close to her chest.  

Logically, she knew that if she opened her eyes, she would see the empty corner of her room – but fear simultaneously paralyzed her and seemed to make the ghost more solid. She took several deep breaths, determined to fully rationalize this apparition once and for all.

_Why are you here?_ Unhelpfully, the ghost did not answer.

But the ghost kept vigil, just as she’d always done. Silent and unmoving, watching over Elena as though guarding her. Elena’s grip on the blankets loosened and her heartbeat slowed. She had never considered the idea of the ghost – her ghost – as a benevolent force, much less a _guardian._ But it felt true, suddenly, beyond all reason. An invisible hand gently squeezed her heart with the conviction of it.

The scraps of photographs in the wastebasket threatened at any moment to emerge and piece themselves back together into monstrous memories. But for now they lay dormant, and Elena took a strange comfort in the idea of her ghost standing in the corner, filtering her thoughts and anxieties like a ghastly dreamcatcher. Gradually, her fear of the wraith fell away entirely like a veil, revealing an ally, an angel, even. All along, the ghost’s dread presence had protected Elena from the imponderable. 

Truly relaxing for the first time all night, Elena rolled over and fell deeply asleep, the benign gaze of the ghost upon her.


	2. Epilogue (from the Ghost's Perspective and in Present Tense)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Both chapters of this work were assignments for my Fiction Writing class. For this particular chapter, the professor asked us to change the perspective and tense of one part of the original story. This is why this chapter is so short, and why it is written in the present tense.

Elena sees me: my goal is accomplished. I am a juxtaposition of shadow and light, sewn together into a horror meant to startle and distract.

She leans against the kitchen counter and gazes warily down the hallway toward where I sit in the computer chair. More precisely, I sit here whenever she is not looking directly – when she looks directly, I transform into an empty chair with a dark jacket hung over the back. Each time I transform back into these ordinary objects, she is both relieved and disappointed.

After a few minutes of transforming back and forth from a chair into my true self, Elena decides to end the game. Perhaps I have given her too much of a fright; perhaps I should have waited a little longer for her to seek me out herself. But I am impatient. She walks over and knocks the jacket from the back of the chair onto its seat so that she can no longer mistake it for my hair. Then she walks upstairs.

I have haunted this house since 2002. That was when Elena first unwittingly invited me to crawl from the screen into her nightmares. I still occasionally make an appearance in her dreams, even though she has grown up and left me behind in my perpetual childhood. I resent her for it. In her adult world, she has so many more things to distract her. She mostly doesn’t need me anymore. But when she comes back here, I feel myself grow more powerful again. The house frightens her; she flails around in it, looking for something comforting and safe in a sea of hostile objects. It is in those moments that I allow myself to float up to her, gently breaking the surface of her subconscious. Then she takes me up and clings to me like a raft, and I almost feel loved.


End file.
